April 24, 2010

The Proust Questionnaire is a questionnaire about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by the French writer Marcel Proust,who believed that people must know and understand themselves before they could know or understand others. He developed a list of subjective questions that he felt would help reveal to people their true selves and the inner personalities of those around them. A similar questionnaire is regularly seen on the back page of Vanity Fair magazine, answered by various celebrities.

In what follows I give my own answers. Why don't you try it ?

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Perfection does not exist. In any case, we have happiness when the distance between reality and what we want is minimized ... this distance is almost never zero.

April 15, 2010

You may wonder why this post is in English. A few months ago, a fellow blogger brought to my attention that my posts were ... all Greek to her, and that the various translation software engines I suggested, were all deplorable. That's why today I finally decided to try my ... super duper english.

One of my dreams as a teenager was to become an alto sax player. Instead, I became a superb sax ... listener !!! Why ? I knew that in any field, particularly in the fine arts, fulfillment of dreams occurs only when talent coexists with hard work and dedication. In those "teen" years my mind was permeated with the arbitrary notion, that I lacked all the aforementioned prerequisites. Furthermore, sport, chess and (later) universities occupied most of my free time, and the net result was that I never even touched the ... bloody instrument. Sometimes I wonder, not without remorse ... how can one be relatively certain of something like this, without even trying, at least once ? The situation doesn't get any better, whenever my brother - an excellent latin jazz guitarist and composer - tells me that I have a unique "musical" ear ! Sometimes I suspect he does it just to annoy me for not playing the sax, and of course he cracks me up - quite easily - most of the time !

After this brief encounter with my peculiar elephant, you may have guessed that of all the musical instruments, my absolute choice are the "brass" ones, saxophone being the real king of the horns. I love this instrument, because I think it approximates the human voice more closely than any of its rivals. The most observant readers will have already realized that more than 90 % of the songs hidden in the pictures of my posts, contain "brass" sounds.